From Our Archives: The Iron Lady

"Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall," the first eBook in the Progressive's Hidden History series, is available for purchase, and a second entry commemorating Earth Day is upcoming! To mark the launch, we're shining a light on some great writing from our archives -- just to give you a taste of what to expect.

Margaret Thatcher died yesterday at the age of 87. Milton Mayer, when writing "This England," an article for the October 1983 issue of the Progressive, did not mince words when it came to assessing the inchoate legacy of his prime minister:

Margaret Thatcher spoke to the British tradition, and as good as destroyed the party of the workers who no longer want to think of themselves as workers. And in passing she turned back what a couple of years ago looked like a centrist threat in the form of the new Liberal/Social Democratic Alliance. Like Reagan, she unmistakably projects a kind of capitalist cannibalism, or Social Darwinism. She means to denationalize British Airways and the country's airports, telephone system, and steel industry; she means to establish, on an utterly insufficient island, a little America.

Why did her countrymen, including her unemployed countrymen, vote for her? They voted for her because the recklessly brutal Falklands venture aroused the brutal recklessness that underlies, and has always underlain, the genteel reserve mistakenly taken for the British character. It wasn't genteel reserve that made the scepter'd isle the ravening terror of the world a century and two ago. Among the naval and military greats, savages in uniform, to whom their victims the world around were Kipling's lesser breeds, the genteel reserve readily gave way to the bullyboy.